LUTHER BURBANK 



this. And the result is recorded in the present day 

 lists of the cataloguer. Whenever, through the 

 chance blending of favorable ancestral strains an 

 exceptional individual has appeared, cions have 

 been cut from that individual and grafted on other 

 trees, and new cions cut from this and again 

 grafted, until the fruit of this individual grows on 

 so many different trees and in so many different 

 regions that its peculiar qualities are thought of 

 as representing an established variety rather than 

 an individual personality. 



But if you will gather the seed from the apples 

 of a single tree of even the best market "variety" 

 in any given season, and will plant these seeds, 

 you may have, when the seedlings come to fruit- 

 ing, new "varieties" of apple, each differing from 

 all its fellows, in such profusion that you may, if 

 you so desire, exhaust your ingenuity in finding 

 new names and publish a catalog of your own 

 with a list of eight thousand or so "varieties" of 

 apple that no one hitherto has ever seen or 

 heard of. 



That simple but rather startling fact brings 

 into sharp relief the difference between the mean- 

 ing of the word "variety" as applied to such a 

 fruit as the apple and the meaning of the same 

 word as applied to races, of plants in a state of 

 nature. 



[184] 



